Poll: Pirate or not?

[The Lyre]

Okay, I'm confused;

I don't feel like quoting such a huge post

This would suggest that you are talking to me...even though my post wasn't 'huge'...it was slightly large.

You don't like that other people pirate, and make companies attempt to combat it with DRM?

But this does not in the slightest; I am a pirate myself...so what you are saying is that I apparently want to be the only one who can pirate...bwwwwwwah?

 

[Altorin]

I'm sorry, I got off on a tangent, the only part I was responding to was when you say it takes a while for people to crack games and in that time, the company makes more money.

and I was using the term "You" loosely to refer to anyone who believes what I was saying.

I don't believe that's the case, and I apologize for your brain melting confusion

 

[ianuam]

ffIX,VIII and VII. Only reason was that i could no longer find them in any store (and this was about 3ish years ago). I buy legit now. Same with music, used to - no longer.

 

[Flour]

When they're pre-owned they're getting money from the original purchase price. When pirating, especially where leaks are concerned, no money is made. And only one person can buy a pre-owned game at a time. Look up the amount of downloads of a popular pirated game, that's several hundred thousand purchases that they did not have. Per game.

Several hundred thousand purchases they would NEVER have.
The whole "developers lose money" argument is flawed because it assumes pirates would go out and buy the games if torrents weren't available.

 

[Altorin]

When they're pre-owned they're getting money from the original purchase price. When pirating, especially where leaks are concerned, no money is made. And only one person can buy a pre-owned game at a time. Look up the amount of downloads of a popular pirated game, that's several hundred thousand purchases that they did not have. Per game.

Several hundred thousand purchases they would NEVER have.
The whole "developers lose money" argument is flawed because it assumes pirates would go out and buy the games if torrents weren't available.

some would, but not hundreds of thousands of them.

 

[Fronken]

So no, those lucky enough to be able to support EA and their constant rehash of sequels by forking out pound after pound are not 'suffering'. Even if I could do so, I would not want to support the gaming industry - mainstream gaming has no creativity, initiative or self-respect these days, meaning that I'd be paying 40 pounds for an average 7 hours of gameplay...I don't call that value for money.

Mainstream gaming's lowest-common-denominator, bland, useless-feature-bloated offerings are a direct result of piracy. 10,000 units pirated on a game by EA that sells millions of copies looks like a drop in the bucket to the gamers, but to the eyes of smaller developers who expect to appeal to a smaller base it's discouraging at the very least. When the big boys start reporting numbers in the hundreds of thousands of pirated copies, what then does the little guy do? Merge or don't develop the IP, or worse, half-ass the attempt in order to cut costs. Obviously it's not the only reason for the state of the industry, but to say that piracy has no effect, or that nobody (or nobody important - everyone at EA is a monster, right?) is harmed by it is very far from true.

That said, to me EA's DRM doesn't look like an attempt to combat piracy, despite claims that it's there for that reason. Instead it looks more like an attempt to control used game sales, but since I don't have a first-hand look at it (not going to buy anything with that DRM) it's just a pet theory.